(This is part 10 of a 12 part series to provide you with some helpful health and fitness tips over the holiday season)

The weight room doesn’t have to be your nemesis. A well-structured strength and conditioning plan can help anyone, male or female, build strength, power, endurance and durability that will pay massive dividends. But a handful of costly weight room mistakes can sabotage your efforts. Here’s a list of 10 common mistakes I see many people make while training.

Skipping a Warm-Up

One of the most costly mistakes often happens as soon as you walk into the gym. If you skip your warm-up, you miss out on an opportunity to improve mobility and flexibility, and you increase your chance of injury. A proper warm-up should:

Raise the body’s core temperature

Mobilize and stabilize joints such the hips, shoulders and ankles

Preview movement patterns you will use in your workout (e.g., Squats, Lunges, etc.)

Don’t be the guy or gal who does a few arm swings and toe touches and thinks you’re ready to go. Do yourself a favor and take 3 to 5 minutes to perform a thorough warm-up. That means foam rolling, mobility drills and a few light sets of your first strength exercise to get your body ready.

Performing Too Many Isolation Exercises

Life requires fluid, full-body movements. So why on earth would you spend time in the gym working one body part at a time? Instead, pick multi-joint strength movements like Squats, Deadlifts and Push-ups, along with powerful exercises like Jumps, Sprints and Throws. In fact, put them together to build unparalleled explosiveness with post-activation potentiation.

Never Deloading

Many “meat heads” pride themselves on pushing to the brink of exhaustion, but always teetering on that line can halt your progress. Every once in awhile, you need to take a step back to take two steps forward. Deloading is a planned training period during which you don’t work quite as hard, thus allowing your body and mind to recover so you can keep getting stronger. If you’re training hard at least four days per week, you should take a week-long deload every four to eight weeks to recharge your batteries.

Training to Failure Too Often

Your workouts should build you up, not break you down. There’s no faster way to leave yourself feeling broken down than training to failure too often. Luckily, you don’t have to train to failure at all to get bigger and stronger. As a general guideline, always leave one or two good reps in the tank at the end of each set. You’ll recover faster and still make progress. A surefire way to avoid training to failure is to pick the right number of sets and reps for each exercise. Big, heavy exercises like Squats and Deadlifts lend themselves to fewer reps and more sets, while lighter exercises like Push-Ups and Pull-Ups work best with more reps and fewer sets.

Wearing Improper Footwear

Did you know that what you wear on your feet can have a huge impact on how you move? Your workout footwear can greatly enhance—or reduce—the effectiveness of your exercises. For example, wearing running shoes to Squat or Deadlift is a common mistake. The soles of running shoes are cushioned to reduce impact while jogging. But when you’re lifting a heavy barbell, you want a solid heel so you can produce force into the ground. The squishy soles of a running shoe reduce stability and limit how well your legs produce force. Instead, opt for a flat-soled shoe or a heel-elevated shoe with a hard sole.

Sacrificing Form for Weight on the Bar

As fun as it is to throw around heavy weight, you need to remember that it nots how much you lift, but how you lift it. Lifting heavy weight is one of the fastest and most effective ways to become stronger, but never at the expense of proper form. If you get hurt in the gym, all your efforts were for nothing. Be sure to take the time to master the technique before loading exercises with heavy weight. Train under the guidance of a certified coach or trainer whenever possible, and use spotters when appropriate.

Doing Too Much Cardio

Cardiovascular endurance is certainly important but doing a whole bunch of cardio just to do cardio isn’t going to cut it. Always know and understand the “why’s” to your workouts, not the blind allegiance to a particular method.

Not Doing Enough Cardio

On the other hand, doing no cardio at all is a bad idea. Even though most of us need strength and power more than we need endurance, it’s a costly mistake to ignore aerobic conditioning entirely. That’s because all recovery is aerobic in nature. Your oxidative energy system is responsible for regenerating ATP, the body’s main energy source. Intense exercise requires lots of ATP, and if your oxidative system is poorly developed, you’ll take a long time to recover.

Neglecting Unilateral Exercises

Big lifts like the squat and bench press are fantastic strength movements, but make sure you follow them up with unilateral exercises like lunges and rows to reflect the one-sided nature of life.

Not Putting Your Phone Away

A lack of focus will derail anyone’s workout, and nothing does that faster than a smartphone. When you walk through the gym doors, your only priority for the next 60 to 90 minutes should be about getting better. Nothing on Facebook or Instagram will help you lift more weight or get more explosive. To avoid distractions, use a notebook instead of your phone to track your workouts. If you use your phone to listen to music, arrange a playlist ahead of time so you’re not fidgeting with your phone mid-workout to find a song you like.

Jeff Harrison is a fitness coach based in Pottstown, PA. He received a BS in Exercise and Sport Science from Penn State University and is an NSCA Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS), NSCA Certified Personal Trainer (NSCA-CPT) and
ACE Advanced Health and Fitness Specialist (ACE-AHFS). Jeff's articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals as well as consumer oriented websites and magazines.